Review: Fifty Shades Darker

It's a tale as old as time, beauty taming the beast, and Fifty Shades Darker, the second installment of the best-selling erotic saga, finds the beast attempting to curb his darker predilections in order to win back his beauty.

Picking up mere weeks after Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) decided that Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) had taken a bit too much pleasure from inflicting pain upon her, Fifty Shades Darker, despite its title, is a far lighter outing than its predecessor. Anastasia is now working at a publishing house as an assistant to editor Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), whose surname should tip one off to his less than honourable intentions regarding our heroine. Christian, meanwhile, can't get her out of his mind and goes typically over the top - sending a large bouquet of flowers, purchasing all the large photographs of Anastasia taken by her friend Jose - in his efforts to have her back in his life.

"No rules, no punishments, no more secrets" are the new terms of their renewed relationship. Servicing Anastasia seems to be another albeit unspoken condition and a very beneficial one for Christian as, despite her earlier mild protestations, Anastasia is soon panting for Christian to return to his kinkier ways. As with the original film, the so-called deviant sex acts still fall in the vanilla end of the spectrum as far as BDSM enthusiasts are concerned - nipple clamps make an appearance, though not on the intended body part; leather cuffs, vaginal beads, elevator shenanigans, and spankings come into play. What differentiates these from the sex in the first film is that, whilst there's still an inordinate amount of heavy breathing, the pleasure is predominantly derived from the play rather than the punishment.

Despite ceding some control to Anastasia in the bedroom, Christian asserts his command outside of it - ordering for her in a restaurant, forbidding her to go to a book exposition in New York with her boss, buying the publishing house in which she works - though Anastasia is more assertive in her playful tweaking of his dominating tendencies and even manages to glean a bit more personal information about Christian than he previously shared. Getting to know more about Christian, however, brings a new set of problems - namely, an obsessed former submissive named Leila (Bella Heathcote) and Elena Lincoln (Kim Basinger, whose casting here is a great nod to the film's cinematic forebear 9 1/2 Weeks), the woman who took his virginity when he was 15 and who keeps warning Anastasia that she is a fool for believing she can change Christian.

Of course, nothing will deter our Miss Steele from carrying on with Christian, not even her own misgivings after observing the depths of his control over Leila, whose instinctive submissiveness would unsettle anyone. Fifty Shades Darker makes no bones about setting up the plot of Fifty Shades Freed, the final installment set for release next year, nor does it pretend to be anything more than high-gloss trash. James Foley, taking over the directorial reins from Sam Taylor-Johnson, certainly showcases his very attractive stars to maximum effect (though a gym scene with a shirtless Dornan is snicker-inducing) though neither he nor Johnson and Dornan can overcome the expected silliness and incohesion of Niall Leonard's screenplay.

Fifty Shades Darker

Directed by: James Foley

Written by: Niall Leonard; based on the book by E.L. James

Starring: Jamie Dornan, Dakota Johnson, Bella Heathcote, Kim Basinger, Luke Grimes, Jennifer Ehle, Max Martini, Marcia Gay Harden, Eric Johnson, Rita Ora, Eloise Mumford